7.Ответьте на вопросы по тексту:

1.. Where is Tibet medicine rooted ?

2.Why had some of our green friends already disap­peared?

3. Why did most developed medicines consist of many components, including 10 to 20 and occasionally 45—60 kinds of herbs?

4.What was the real reason for all mysterious incompre­hensible events ?

5. When was Heavy water discovered?

6. What was heavy water essential in?

7. .Why did heavy water prove to be dead?

8. Составьте аннотацию к тексту (2 – 3 предложения).

9. Составьте реферат текста (10 – 15 предложений).

10. Составьте план текста и перескажите текст.

Вариант 7

1. Прочитайте и переведите текст:

The History of Science

On the simplest level, science is knowledge of the world of nature. There are many regularities in nature that mankind has had to recognize for survival since the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species. The Sun and the Moon periodically repeat their movements. Some motions, like the daily "motion" of the Sun, are simple to observe; others, like the annual "motion" of the Sun, are far more difficult. Both motions corre­late with important terrestrial events. Day and night provide the basic rhythm of human existence; the seasons determine the migration of ani­mals upon which humans depended for millennia for survival. With the invention of agriculture, the seasons became even more crucial, for fail­ure to recognize the proper time for planting could lead to starvation. Science defined simply as knowledge of natural processes is universal among mankind, and it has existed since the dawn of human existence.

The mere recognition of regularities does not exhaust the full mean­ing of science, however. In the first place, regularities may be simply constructs of the human mind. Humans leap to conclusions; the mind cannot tolerate chaos, so it constructs regularities even when none ob­jectively exists. Thus, for example, one of the astronomical "laws" of the Middle Ages was that the appearance of comets presaged a great up­heaval, as the Norman Conquest of Britain followed the comet of 1066. True regularities must be established by detached examination of data. Science, therefore, must employ a certain degree of skepticism to prevent premature generalization.

Regularities, even when expressed mathematically as laws of nature, are not fully satisfactory to everyone. Some insist that genuine under­standing demands explanations of the causes of the laws, but it is in the realm of causation that there is the greatest disagreement. Modern quan­tum mechanics, for example, has given up the quest for causation and today rests only on mathematical description. Modern biology, on the other hand, thrives on causal chains that permit the understanding of physiological and evolutionary processes in terms of the physical activi­ties of entities such as molecules, cells, and organisms. But even if causa­tion and explanation are admitted as necessary, there is little agreement on the kinds of causes that are permissible, or possible, in science.

Certain conventions governed the appeal to God or the gods or to spirits. Gods and spirits, it was held, could not be completely arbitrary in their actions; otherwise the proper response would be propitiation, not rational investigation. But since the deity or deities were themselves ra­tional, or bound by rational principles, it was possible for humans to uncover the rational order of the world.

Science, then, is to be considered as knowledge of natural regulari­ties that is subjected to some degree of skeptical rigour and explained by rational causes. One final caution is necessary. Nature is known only through the senses, of which sight, touch, and hearing are the dominant ones, arid the human notion of reality is skewed toward the objects of these senses. The invention of such instruments as the telescope, the mi­croscope, and the Geiger counter has brought an ever-increasing range of phenomena within the scope of the senses. Thus, scientific knowledge, of the world is only partial, and the progress of science follows the ability of humans to make phenomena perceivable.

The 20th-century Revolution.

By the end of the 19th century, the dream of the mastery of nature for the benefit of mankind, first expressed in all its richness by Sir Fran­cis Bacon, seemed on the verge of realization. Science was moving ahead on all fronts, reducing ignorance and producing new tools for the amel­ioration of the human condition.

But this sunny confidence did not last long. One annoying problem was that the radiation emitted by atoms proved increasingly difficult to reduce to known mechanical principles. Within a span of 10 short years, roughly 1895-1905, these and related problems came to a head and wrecked the mechanistic system the 19th century. The discovery of X-rays and radioactivity revealed an unexpected new complexity in the struc­ture of atoms. Max Planck's solution to the problem of thermal radia­tion introduced a discontinuity into the concept of energy that was inex­plicable in terms of classical thermodynamics.

The enunciation of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905 not only destroyed the ether and all the physics that depended on it but also redefined physics as the study of relations between observers and events, rather than of the events themselves.

Absolute space was a fiction. The very foundations of physics threat­ened to crumble. Mechanical models were no longer acceptable, because there were processes (like light) for which no consistent model could be constructed. No longer could physicists speak with confidence of physi­cal reality, but only of the probability of making certain measurements.

All this being said, there is still no doubt that science in the 20th centu­ry has worked wonders. The new physics - relativity, quantum mechanics, particle physics - may outrage common sense, but it enables physicists to probe to the very limits of physical reality. Their instruments and mathe­matics permit modern scientists to manipulate subatomic particles with relative ease, to reconstruct the first moment of creation, and to glimpse dimly the grand structure and ultimate fate of the universe.

The revolution in physics has spilled over into chemistry and biology and led to hitherto undreamed of capabilities for the manipulation of atoms and molecules and of cells and their genetic structures. Chemists perform molecular tailoring today as a matter of course, cutting and shaping molecules at will. Genetic engineering makes possible active human intervention in the evolutionary process and holds out the possi­bility of tailoring living organisms, including the human organism, to specific tasks. This second scientific revolution may prove to be, for good or ill, the most important event in the history of mankind.